


L'esprit d'escalier

by Tokyo_the_Glaive



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Hux is Not Nice, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 12:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8209384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tokyo_the_Glaive/pseuds/Tokyo_the_Glaive
Summary: It’s six minutes to four in the morning when Hux wakes suddenly to the feeling that all is not right. It’s not an unusual happenstance for him—not lately, anyway. It’s taken a long while for him to—adjust. That’s the word. He’s been slow—and how he utterly despises the notion—to adjust to the emptiness in his bed. It had been familiar, once, routine and ordinary. Lately, it’s been unnatural. Hux has felt the hole in his life as keenly as the coolness in his sheets when he climbs into them and in the unbearable lightness of sleeping alone.(Or, the one where Hux and Ben were a dysfunctional couple who broke up and haven't been the same since. Modern AU.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title and work both inspired by Forever Losing Sleep's Espirit d'escalier.  
>  _You should have let me die that night on the couch..._

It’s six minutes to four in the morning when Hux wakes suddenly to the feeling that all is not right. It’s not an unusual happenstance for him—not lately, anyway. It’s taken a long while for him to—adjust. That’s the word. He’s been slow—and how he utterly despises the notion—to adjust to the emptiness in his bed. It had been familiar, once, routine and ordinary. Lately, it’s been unnatural. Hux has felt the hole in his life as keenly as the coolness in his sheets when he climbs into them and in the unbearable lightness of sleeping alone.

Hux slips out from underneath the covers and listens. It’s another old habit, laden with far more bad memories than waking alone, but they are older memories, buried memories. They cannot hurt him as—as the others can. He listens, and waits.

There’s something downstairs. Hux can hear the shuffle of steps—bipedal, therefore most likely human. _Burglar?_ As quietly as he can manage, Hux moves to the door and then to the top of the carpeted stairway, stepping as lightly as he knows how. The lights are all off, but outside of his bedroom the racket from downstairs seems even louder. If there’s a burglary going on, Hux’s robber is doing a very poor job of things.

Hux waits. There’s a groan—a sob, more like, something agonized and brief—and then silence. There’s no opening and closing of doors, no rattling, no more steps. Hux takes the initiative to move downstairs to survey the damages. He knows this house better than anyone; after all, he built it using the proceeds from the sales of his father’s estate and many of his own belongings besides. If the intruder is still inside, Hux will manage it.

He presses himself flat against the wall when he reaches the bottom of the stairs to stare into half of the sitting room. There’s no one in view, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone _there_. Hux heard them, and he’s sure they haven’t left. Carefully, he rounds the corner to see the entirety of the room.

There, prone and passed out on the sofa, is Kylo Ren—no, _Ben Solo_. Hux’s stomach turns even as all of the tension leaves his body. He stares. He knows he ought to check the locks—no doubt Ky— _Ben_ —failed to throw away his key like he said he had; that’s why Hux hadn’t heard him come in. He doesn’t, though. Instead, he takes a few steps toward Ben.

Ben smells terrible, like the floor of a particularly dirty bar. His hair is matted, there’s dirt under his fingernails, and his scarf— _his favorite_ , Hux thinks fleetingly before he has the wherewithal to squash the thought—is torn at the edges. He’s out cold, too, face down against the pillows like a discarded rag doll. More out of a sense of duty than anything else, Hux pushes down Ben’s scarf and checks his pulse: slow, but steady. Just drunk, then. Probably. Hopefully. Hux isn’t prepared to lug him to the ER if there’s something else in his system.

Hux considers the man on his couch—a man he hasn’t seen in three weeks, a man who _humiliated_ him, _lied_ to him…

A man who’s currently drunk and passed out in his house looking far worse for wear than when Hux last saw him.

Hux sighs. He could just leave him there. He could go back upstairs and crawl back into his frigid, overlarge bed and fall back to sleep. He could. But if K—Ben’s so drunk that he’s ended up in Hux’s house—a place he swore up and down he’d never come anywhere near, out of disgust and hatred and the rest—then perhaps something more needs to be done.

Carefully, Hux rolls Ren. He knows he ought to put him in the recovery position, but he’d have to look it up, and besides, Ben’s heavy; Hux doubts he can move him more than he already has. As soon as he has Ben on his side and propped so that he’s unlikely to choke if he vomits, Hux steps back.

He can’t leave him there. He wants to—he’d love to, in fact—but he can’t.

 _Not alone, anyway_ , Hux thinks, sour. He walks to the kitchen and puts on the kettle. If the beeping wakes Ben up, so be it. It won’t be the worst thing they’ve fought over. For just a brief moment, Hux wonders if he’s pushing his luck—if drunk Ben will be violent enough to attack him, to break him in two like he threatened to on so many occasions.

It’s not enough to stop Hux. He might not have much faith in Ben—none, as a matter of fact; not after what he did—but Hux has the utmost belief in himself to stop Bens drunk rampage should it come to that. In the dark, Hux picks out a teabag and waits.

* * *

Ben wakes four hours later with a terrible headache and the singular realization that he didn’t make it home last night.

(He hasn’t made it home in the past six nights, as a matter of fact, give or take a few days, so it isn’t really a surprise. He stopped keeping track of the days when he got tired of his mother texting him asking him why he disappeared again. He’d tossed his phone off of a bridge then. It had felt good.)

The surroundings are familiar enough, though. He’s been here before. The shock of red hair and slitted green eyes staring at him only solidify what he already knows: this is Hux’s house.

“What the fuck,” Ben says. He tries to sit up but his head swims and he has to lay back down. He thought he’d be used to hangovers by now. He’s drunk more in the past few weeks than he has in his entire life, yet he hasn’t failed to feel any less terrible with each passing day.

“I could say the same,” Hux says, and his _voice_ turns Ben’s stomach. He hauls himself up and staggers toward where he remembers the downstairs bathroom being. It’s as clean and mind-numbingly bright as he remembers, and his knees collide with the tile floors as he empties his stomach into the toilet.

Hux doesn’t come in to make sure he’s all right. He doesn’t kneel beside him to hold back Ben’s long, greasy hair or to stroke his back reassuringly. Ben’s not sure if he’s happy about that or not.

When he emerges what feels like a few minutes later, it’s to find that half an hour has elapsed. Hux is sitting in the living room across from the couch Ben woke up on, thumbing through something on his phone.

 _Mobile_ , Ben thinks, his voice too loud in his own head. Hux calls it that, the stupid foreign fuck. Ben staggers back to the couch and collapses again.

“On your side,” Hux orders. Ben groans into the cushions. “I rolled you once, I’m not doing it again.”

“Piss off,” Ben says into the seat of the couch. He hears Hux stand. There are footsteps, and then the sound of running water. Ben’s stomach rolls, empty; he’d forgotten to flush away the vomit. Evidently Hux has taken care of it.

“You’re disgusting,” Hux informs him when he returns to the living room. Ben rolls just so he can glare at Hux, but it’s difficult when Hux opens the curtains, letting in the blisteringly bright light of day. His head throbs and he moves to cover his eyes again. “Where is it?” Hux demands, his voice grating and all too loud.

Ben can’t make heads or tails of what’s happening anymore. “What?” he asks.

“The key,” Hux demands.

“What key?” Ben asks even as he realizes, his entire body flushing with shame—Hux knows about the key. He kept it, after they broke up—or, more accurately, after Ben left Hux. Ben said he’d thrown it away—he thought about it, too, when he threw away his phone—but he’d kept it anyway. Something to hate Hux by, he told himself.

Now, he just feels like a damned fool.

“Back pocket,” Ben drawls. His mouth burns as if he’s swallowed acid. “I think.”

Hux’s hands are on him in an instant, and Ben yelps.

“Quit wiggling, you arse,” Hux orders.

“You don’t get to touch my ass,” Ben says. “Get your hands off—that’s _mine_.”

Hux holds the key in one hand. “It’s a key to _my_ house, something _you_ don’t get to keep. And I don’t want anything more to do with your _ass_ ,” he says, emphasizing the American pronunciation.

Ben swallows, throat still dry and raw, and leans back.

“Why did you bring me here?” Ben asks.

Hux’s face scrunches up in the way Ben’s always hated. “What?”

“The fuck?” Ben asks, mostly to himself. “You bring me here, steal my key—”

Hux holds up a hand, and the light that reflects off of his ridiculously pale fingers forces Ben to squint.

“I didn’t _bring_ you here, you daft idiot,” Hux says, “you used _this_ to break in yourself. I found you on my damn couch. I live here; what the fuck are _you_ doing here?”

Ben doesn’t remember coming in, but he does remember snippets—he had used a key, he remembers. He’d thought he was going home. His stomach sinks at the realization that drunk him still thinks of Hux’s house as—

“You didn’t change the locks,” Ben says instead. “Who’s the idiot now?”

The look on Hux’s face could melt a steel beam, but Ben’s too hungover and worn out to do anything but glare back.

“You’re going to get out of here,” Hux says quietly, “and you’re never going to come back.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Ben taunts, aware even as he does so that he’s being a dick. If Hux really wanted to stick it to him, he could have called the cops last night, or—Hux had mentioned rolling him, and Ben had woken on his side.

“Get a damn restraining order,” Hux responds, “or call the police. Now, _get out_.”

Ben makes no move to stand. “You should have let me die here on your couch,” he says. “Better for the both of us.”

Hux closes his eyes and sits back in his chair. Ben watches the rise and fall of his chest, hypnotized. It’s so easy and simultaneously so hard to remember why Ben did what he did—why he left, why he loved—

“You want to be melodramatic, do it somewhere else,” Hux says finally. “I’m done with this.”

“What’s wrong, finally sick of dealing with my _issues_?” Ben taunts.

Hux’s eyes snap open as he leans forward. “I might have been sick of it months ago if you hadn’t lied about who you were.”

His words bite. Ben grins and says, “You’re such a self-obsessed dick. If you’d given half a damn you’d have known.”

“So you said last time,” Hux says. He stands. “I don’t have time for this. You might be able to live off of your _family_ ,” he says with a sneer, “but some of us have to work.”

That hurts more than it ought to. “Fuck off,” Ben says.

“This is my house,” Hux shouts. His face goes red, and to Ben he looks positively ridiculous, or he would if the sound of his voice didn’t make Ben’s ears ring. “ _Get. Out_.”

Ben tries to stand and fails. It seems harder than it did before. He tries again and manages to get himself upright if not standing.

“Now I remember,” he says. Hux’s expression eases a bit. Ben grins, unkind and deliberately cruel. “I remember why I dumped you.”

Ben’s face swings to one side in one brutal motion with a resounding _slap_. His vision momentarily blacks, then he’s rising to his feet.

“You hit me,” he says, his gaze refusing to focus. He feels a red haze of fury settling around him. He takes a step toward Hux, but he stops when he sees his expression: Hux is white as the walls of his house, livid and furious and he’s wearing—

Ben stops. He slouches, dropping the scant few inches it takes to reach Hux’s height. He opens his mouth, closes it again.

“Get out,” Hux says, one final time, voice flat. Ben stares at him, waiting for something else—anything, _say anything else_ —but Hux doesn’t. Ben’s crossed a line. He wonders how he hadn’t noticed it before—how he didn’t think…

“You…” Ben can hardly get that word out. Hux swallows and remains resolutely silent.

Ben walks to the door, the gap between him and Hux widening until it feels there’s an ocean between them. Ben stands on the front porch, motionless, numb in the merciless sunlight, and he jumps when the door slams behind him. He can hear as Hux engages the lock, then the deadbolt, and he can imagine it just as vividly.

Inside, so close and so far away, Hux is wearing a shirt Ben left behind when things had been good—“ _keep it_ ,” Ben had said, “ _and you can sleep in it when I’m not around._ ”

Hux _had_ kept it, just like Ben had kept the key. The absence of the key in his back pocket is more obvious than the residual taste of bile in his mouth or the feel of oil running down his face from his filthy hair. There’s something missing—something important.

Ben turns back to face the house as he slowly moves away. He walks backwards and notices how a curtain moves on the second floor—as if someone had pulled it back, had been watching until Ben looked there. Ben swallows, turns away.

He remembers why he loved Hux. He’s dizzy as if he feels it anew, as if he— Ben can’t bring himself to admit what it is, what it still is. Evidently, Hux can’t, either.

The gap widens to infinity with each step he takes without looking back.


End file.
